GroupBy – Free SQL Server Training

GroupBy.org is free technical training by the community, for the community. Volunteer speakers submit abstracts at GroupBy.org and you – the attendee – vote to pick the sessions. Want to present your own session or just vote on others? Join us at GroupBy.org.

Parameters are a fundamental part of T-SQL programming, whether they are used in stored procedures, in dynamic statements or in ad-hoc queries. Although widely used, most people aren’t aware of the crucial influence they have on query performance. In fact, wrong use of parameters is one of the common reasons for poor application performance.

Does your query sometimes run fast and sometimes slow – even when nothing’s changed? Did it happen to you that a stored procedure, which had always been running for less than a second, suddenly started to run for more than 5 seconds consistently – even when nothing had changed?

In this session, we will learn about plan caching and how the query optimizer handles parameters. We will talk about the pros and cons of parameter sniffing (don’t worry if you don’t know what that means) as well as about simple vs. forced parameterization. But most important – we will learn how to identify performance problems caused by poor parameter handling, and we will also learn many techniques for solving these problems and boosting your application performance.